It is no secret that Elon Musk, the owner and boss of SpaceX, Tesla, and X (formerly Twitter), is making a name for himself in the space transportation, electric vehicle, and social media industries, respectively.
However, there is also some moderate knowledge of his sexual promiscuity and his practice of breeding children from multiple women that the general public either does not know of, dismisses, or outrightly brushes off.
The Musk Bunch
People provided a detailed list of Musk's 12 children and their mothers, as well as the arrangements he made to ensure their care.
It is understood that the tech billionaire has been siring children since 2002.
With Justine Wilson
Half of Musk's current children are with his first ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson. They met as students at Queen's University in Canada and married in 2002.
- Nevada Alexander was Musk's first son, who was born in 2002. However, he tragically died ten months later due to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). In a 2010 Marie Claire article, Wilson expressed grief for the loss.
- Afterward, Wilson gave birth to twin boys Griffin and Xavier Alexander in 2004, making them the oldest at 20. In 2022, Xavier Alexander, aged 18 at the time, filed to legally change both name and gender not to be associated with Musk any longer, and she is now identified as Vivian Jenna Wilson.
- A second batch of multiple births occurred in 2006 via in-vitro fertilization (IVF). This time, it was triplet boys Kai, Saxon, and Damian. They are all currently 18.
Out of all the Musk-Wilson kids, Damian has the potential to follow in his father's entrepreneurial and intellectual footsteps, with a penchant for music on the side.
Musk and Wilson divorced in 2008, and the tech boss told Business Insider two years later that the custody of their five living children was "split evenly" while they were all minors.
Since his divorce from Wilson, Musk has been rotating relationships between at least three women.
He married and divorced actress Talulah Riley twice. They have no children together.
With Grimes (Claire Boucher)
Eventually, Musk had an on-and-off relationship with Canadian singer-songwriter Claire Boucher, better known by her stage name, Grimes. They have three children together, all of them having uniquely eccentric names.
- Born in 2020, X Æ A-12 was the couple's first son. He was partially named after the CIA's Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft. Eventually, his name was changed to X Æ A-XII. The toddler, also known as "X," was prominently seen when Musk brought him to Twitter headquarters in 2022, before his plans to take over and fully rebrand. Boucher shared that her son loved spacecraft, including Musk's SpaceX vehicles.
- Their daughter Exa Dark Sideræl, also known as "Y," was born via a surrogate in 2021, weeks after Musk and Canadian artificial intelligence expert Shivon Zilis had a boy-and-girl twin. Boucher explained to Vanity Fair in 2022 the meaning of her daughter's name, which included the supercomputing term exaFLOPS and a nod to the JRR Tolkien character Galadriel in "Lord of the Rings."
- Journalist Walter Isaacson revealed in his Musk biography that he and Grimes have a second son named Techno Mechanicus, who also goes by the name "Tau."
With Shivon Zilis
While Musk had several affairs with Grimes, he also partnered with Zilis, who later became a director for his brain implant startup Neuralink.
- In 2021, Musk and Zilis secretly welcomed fraternal twins Strider and Azure. According to court documents published by Business Insider, the twins were born before Musk and Boucher welcomed Exa Dark Sideræl. The papers revealed that the parents asked a court in Texas to change their children's names by having the Musk and Zilis names "as part of their middle name." The names of the toddlers, now aged 2, were revealed in 2023.
- Page Six and Bloomberg revealed that Musk and Zilis had a third child in June, making it the 12th Musk Baby. Both parents have not publicly divulged their names and genders as of this writing.
Sexual Promiscuity Issues
While Musk did not discuss his personal life and family, he has strong opinions regarding the issue of birth rates.
In a Wall Street Journal CEO Council in 2021, he said that there were "not enough people" in the world and that birth rates have been declining, a fact observed since the 1960s.
In a 2023 Statista report, Taiwan has the worst fertility rate at 1.09, followed closely by South Korea (1.11), Singapore (1.17), Hong Kong (1.23), and Macau (1.23).
Outside Asia, Italy has the worst birth rate in the developed West at 1.24, followed by Puerto Rico, a US territory (1.25), Spain (1.29), Greece (1.4), and Poland (1.41).
While Musk having 11 children was fun, it was not all sunshine and rainbows.
It could be recalled that the Journal revealed in an exclusive report that Musk was having sexual affairs with several female SpaceX employees, including one who claimed that she had sex with him when she was a young intern. She was later pursued by Musk, who ended up having her on his executive team before leaving in 2019. Another woman also came forward to tell a similar case.
A third told SpaceX's human resources and legal executives that Musk allegedly asked if he wanted to have babies with her.
When given such information about her boss's actions, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell dismissed them as "untruths, mischaracterizations, and revisionist history," which painted a "misleading narrative" against Musk and the company in general.
It remains to be seen if similar incidents were recorded in his other companies.
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